West Midlands Toolkit

The Toolkit exists to support families in their unique journeys, by equipping staff with resources that will be readily available at their fingertips to facilitate best practice, timely care.

The West Midlands Children and Young People’s Palliative Care Toolkit concept grew out of the recognition that common and agreed resources, tools and documentation, around children’s palliative care would support best practice, safe and effective, individualised and responsive care for the families and children within the West Midlands. The vision was to develop the tools and resources and to collate them into a readily available practical Toolkit, so that they could be accessed whatever the care setting or whatever the time of day or night that care was required.

In particular, its aim is to improve the experience of care for all those families within the West Midlands who find themselves in the difficult position of requiring access to children’s palliative care services.

The Toolkit exists to support families in their unique journeys, by equipping staff with resources that will be readily available at their fingertips to facilitate best practice, timely care. Children and their families are central to the whole Toolkit. The Toolkit is in itself a reflection of all that the families and their children have so generously shared with us over the years as we have listened to families needs and planned and delivered care together with them, for each of their individual and unique journeys, as they have loved and cared for their children.

Where available, the resources draw upon nationally recognised, researched and recommended sources. Where national guidance does not yet exist on a particular aspect of care, the guidelines support staff in collectively documenting and delivering what is currently considered best practice within the field of paediatric palliative care and paediatrics within the West Midlands.

The West Midlands Children and Young People’s Palliative Care Toolkit has been funded by the Department of Health. It was launched in April 2011, and was updated most recently in April 2018.